MobiPDA: A Systematic Approach to Mobile-Application Development

The advent of mobile-computing platforms and profitable application-distributing channels has increasingly attracted a large number of non-professional people to mobile application development. They typically start with a simple idea about the applications of their interest; and to complete these applications, they often face two key problems: (

i

) the lack of a systematic method for

exploring ideas

and (

ii

) the lack of a method for

organizing activities

to keep balance between learning, designing and coding. Unfortunately, existing approaches have inadequately address these problems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, named

MobiPDA

, to mobile application development targeting non-professional developers. Our systematic approach provides (

i

) conceptual tools for exploring an initial idea from different perspectives and (

ii

) an activities-organization process to apply these tools in software projects. We performed a comparative analysis with Mobile-D and Mobia, and evaluated MobiPDA on two pilot software projects.